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The Heartbeat No One Could See · Truth in Motion with Dr. Jocelyn

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Truth in Motion with Dr.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Jocelyn, where insight, clarity, and wisdom help you thrive.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Hi there! I've been looking forward to this one.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yesterday we saw that nothing in us works alone.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Grief changed the shape of a heart, and those hearts recovered.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: A picture of a lemon made our mouths water, and we saw that body, mind, emotion, and spirit are one living system.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: What touches one touches all.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Today we go further.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: What if there's more to the body than we can see?
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: In 1905, in the Dutch city of Leiden, a hospital patient sat with both arms in one bucket of salt water and the left leg in another.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: The buckets weren't treatment, they were the wires.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: The salt water carried a signal from the patient's skin through a telephone line that ran about a mile across town to a laboratory.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: And in that laboratory stood a machine that weighed around 600 pounds.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: The man who built it was a physiologist named Wilhelm Inthoven.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And on March 22nd, 1905, his machine made the first clinical recording of a human electrocardiogram, an EKG.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Think about what that means.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Every heartbeat sends an electrical signal through the body, strong enough to be picked up through the skin of our arms and legs.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: It had been happening in every human being who ever lived, and no one could see it.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: In 1924, Einhoven received the Nobel Prize in Physiology for Medicine for his discovery of the mechanism of the electrocardiogram.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Today, a small EKG machine sits in nearly every clinic and ambulance.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody calls the heart's electricity imaginary, but for all of human history before that it was invisible.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't stop at the skin.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: In 1963, two researchers, Gerhard Bowl and Richard McPhee, placed two large coils over a person's chest, and they picked up something else, the heart's magnetic field.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Not inside the body, outside it.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Their recording was noisy, but it was real.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: A few years later, a physicist named David Cohen at MIT built a specially shielded room to block outside interference and the signal became clear.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Today it has a name.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: So when people say they can feel someone's presence before they turn around or that a room felt heavy when they walked in, I don't think we should laugh.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Our hearts are sending out electricity and magnetism every second of our lives.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: We have been surrounded by a field we couldn't see all along.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, we already trust invisible things every single day.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: When you make a phone call, your voice travels through the air as a signal no one can see.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: When you listen to the podcast, it reached you the same way.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: A compass needle swings north pulled by a field no one has ever seen.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: When you drop your keys, gravity pulls them to the floor, and no one has ever seen gravity either.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: We only see what it does.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's how we know most invisible things, not by seeing them, by seeing their effects.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Observable, repeatable every time.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: So the real question was never, can I see it?
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: The real question is what does it do?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Why does this matter?
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because when we only trust what we can see, we throw away half of what heals us.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Many of us had been taught that if it doesn't show up on a scan, it isn't real.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: So we learn to ignore what we feel, the tightness that comes over us around one person, the calm that settles in another place, the relief after a treatment that someone told us shouldn't work.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: The EKG and the magnetic field teach us something simple.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Invisible has never meant unreal.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna say that again.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Invisible has never meant unreal.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: It has only meant not measured yet.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: And when we remember that, we can trust our experience again, and we can open ourselves to kinds of care that work with the unseen parts of us, not just the parts on an X-ray.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Here's where I stand.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: I believe there is more to the body than we can see, not instead of the physical body, but woven all the way through it.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: I work with the unseen layer every day.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Every acupuncture treatment I give works with meridians, which are pathways that no one can see on a scan.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I've watched what happens in the body when those pathways are treated.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not going to pretend the energy body is just a nice idea.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it's part of what a person is.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about meridians.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: In Chinese medicine, meridians are the channels where qi, the body's vital energy, flows.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Acupuncture points sit along them.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: For more than 2,000 years, practitioners have mapped them by careful observation of living people.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And for most of modern medicine, the response has been, show me, where are they?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: We've dissected bodies and there are no tubes.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: But here's what a researcher named Dr.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Helen Longevin found at the University of Vermont.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: She and her colleagues studied cross sections of the human arm, looking at where the traditional acupuncture points fall.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: In 2002, they reported an 80% correspondence between acupuncture point locations and the planes of connective tissue that run between and within the muscles.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: 80%.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: That connective tissue is the fascia, a web that wraps every muscle, every organ, every nerve, and connects all of it from head to toe.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Longevin and her colleague proposed that this relationship between points, meridians, and connective tissue matters for how acupuncture works.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And people feel the pathways too.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: During an acupuncture treatment, many people notice a heaviness, a dull ache, warmth, or a sensation that seems to travel along a line, sometimes far from where the needle itself is placed.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: A needle in the hand and something moves in the arm.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: People describe it in their own words without being told what to expect again and again.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: So the old maps weren't drawn on nothing.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: They line up with real structure in the body.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: The meridians aren't tubes, they're pathways, and we're only beginning to see what they follow.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: That same web of fascia brings me to something I work with in craniosacral therapy.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: John Upledger, the osteopathic physician who developed craniosacral therapy, described something he called an energy cyst.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: The idea is that when we're hurt, a fall, an accident, a blow, sometimes even a deep emotional shock, the force of it can stay held in the tissues.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: The body walls it off the way it might wall off a splinter.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: So we can keep going.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: It shows up as a distortion in the energy field around the body.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: That distortion pulls the fascia out of its natural shape, and distorted fascia restricts the body around it until over time it can cause pain and other physical symptoms.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And with gentle listening hands, a practitioner can often feel it.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: A spot that feels different, denser, stuck.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: And when it releases, people often feel warmth or a wave of emotion or a deep sigh that seems to come from somewhere they didn't know was holding on.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's the unseen and the physical meeting in one place.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Think about what that could mean for us.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: It could help explain why pain sometimes shows up far from where we were hurt.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Why a fall from years ago might still be part of today's headache.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Why a hard season of grief can live in the shoulders long after the tears have stopped.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: When the body holds on, it isn't being stubborn.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's protecting us.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: And when it's ready and it's met with patience, it can let go.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Chinese medicine isn't the only tradition that mapped the unseen body.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Many cultures have described energy centers, like the chakras of India, and a field of light or energy around the person that some call the aura.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: These are maps drawn by people who paid close attention to what they felt and saw in themselves and others over a very long time.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Not every map is the same and not every claim made about them is true.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I'd rather look at an old map with curiosity than throw it away because it doesn't fit inside a scanner.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, the heart's electricity was there in every person who ever lived long before anyone could see it on an EKG.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, being open to the unseen doesn't mean believing everything.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of nonsense out there, and some of it is expensive.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: So we bring the same toolkit we've been building all along.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: The simplest question of all, is it true?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Who's telling me this and what do they gain if I believe it?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: What does it actually do?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a pattern I can observe in my own body over time?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Does it help or does it harm?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And does it line up with what I know of God and of goodness?
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Open hands, clear eyes, we can make room for the unseen and still keep our discernment.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the unseen is exactly where we need it the most.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, the deepest picture of this comes from the Gospels.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: In Luke chapter 8, a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Scripture says she had spent all her living on physicians and no one could heal her.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: She came up behind Jesus in a crowd and touched the fringe of his garment, and immediately the bleeding stopped.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus stopped and asked, Who was it that touched me?
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Peter pointed out the obvious.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: The crowd was pressing in on him from every side.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: But Jesus said, Someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Power, something unseen that went out from one body into another and changed it physically.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Twelve years of bleeding stopped in an instant.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then he turned to her and said, Daughter, your faith has made you well, go in peace.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Paul puts it this way in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, verse 18.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: We look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: The unseen isn't less real than the body.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: It may even be the most real thing about us.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: This week we tend the garden, and today we tend the part of the garden that we can't see.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Here's today's practice.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Rub your palms together briskly for about 10 seconds.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Then slowly bring them apart just a few inches and hold them facing each other.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Close your eyes.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: What do you notice?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Warmth, tingling, a sense of something between your hands.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Slowly move them closer, then a little farther apart.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Just notice.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to name it or prove it.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Simply let yourself feel something that can't be seen.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: And say a quiet thank you to the God who made every part of you, the seen and the unseen.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Today we looked at what's more than we can see.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: We met Wilhelm Einthoven and his buckets of salt water and watched the heart's invisible electricity appear on paper.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: We saw the heart's magnetic field measured outside the body.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: We remembered that we already live by invisible things like gravity and radio signals.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: We saw acupuncture points line up with real planes in the body's connective tissue.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: And we talked about energy held in the tissues and the old maps of the energy body.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we heard Jesus say, power has gone out from me.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: And we saw why it matters.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Invisible has never meant unreal.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: When we trust only what we can see, we lose half of what heals us.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: When we make room for the unseen, we can trust what we feel again.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow we look at something every one of us carries.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: A body that heals, a built-in drive to repair, and a body that is always making the wisest response it can.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow we look at a body that heals.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'll meet you there with you every step of the way.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Keep the conversation going.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Find your next steps in notes from a fellow traveler, my blog.